“First, we rarely consider extremists on our side to be on our side. This is called in philosophy the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. For example, I might show you a tweet in which someone I perceive as your ally says something completely insane. You might respond: “Please, that’s not an ally of mine. No real [whatever] thinks that way!” But of course, you probably believe that your opponents are defined by their extremes (or again, by their failure to control their extremes).”
This is such a big piece of this for me because I think you can really learn to see this psychological pattern as it’s happening and before it flourishes into extremist mental ranting. FAE for scales larger than 1.
When we’re in default mode network / papança mental rambling, it’s so easy to let the defense attorney pilot indefinitely. I’d like to think being a naturally argumentative person equips me to occasionally turn the tools on myself and simulate the prosecution at a productive fidelity.
Panança! 100%. We are direct beneficiaries of the Dick Wolf media empire; ten thousand episodes of “Law and Order” later and we’re ready to be demolished on cross, anticipate it, and take it seriously. I do think it’s very helpful to have been horribly wrong a lot, which makes it unfortunate for anyone born later than us. I got to humiliate myself locally; today the costs of errors seem to be much higher (sometimes).
Some echoes in here of DFW’s “This is Water”, including the exhortation at the end. DFW closed with “I wish you way more than luck”; we all need persistence and wisdom and luck not to be captivated by this phenomenon.
But it’s possible to do so! For me, politics has been a helpful example: like 85% of my Facebook friends & 50% of my Twitter follows were Elizabeth Warren fans, and it was illuminating to realize that in real life approximately nobody cared about her campaign. But of course I also spent a good 18 months spending hours on Twitter most days, pumping cortisol into my veins until I would come to, shaking. I feel lucky not to be in that place anymore.
I haven’t read that essay in years but I, like a lot of people I think, really loved it. It seems like getting old has me on a bit of a theme, and that theme has something to do with the substitution of reality with something else, something rather worse at least for one’s sanity!
Campaigns are an extremely strong demonstration of this, for better and much worse!
Amazing post. Loved it as always! My mind kept taking me back to the format and the etiquette it promotes as the biggest culprit in this. A comment, a tweet composer, a blank canvas seems far too unnatural. It asks people to form a complete thought in the form of a statement immediately after reading anything and everything. Even this textfield that I'm typing on right now started with "Write a comment..." but why!? It would be like me saying something out loud, to you or a large crowd, and then immediately asking everyone to react publicly and eloquently in a way that will be recorded in time forever. Idk, this is not a well-formed thought but I think there's something about the format (all formats we've invented so far) in which we engage with each other online that exacerbates the need to make a statement, however radical it may be.
I do love to imagine how these UIs would work “IRL.” You and I go to have lunch at some restaurant with around 150-200 other people and in the middle of the meal, the waiter approaches and offers us a bullhorn, and we *immediately* start talking about the things we think the other diners are mistaken about!
It’s a mess man. Proud to have played an infinitesimally small role in it all lmfao. “Bullhorn Designers.”
“More than anything else, to me, this is what the Internet is: mutual reactive extremification running amok in countless domains in an accelerating and self-reinforcing process.”
Evergreen question: when you say “the internet”, do you mean social media?
I might yes! If I do, though, I’d like to mean it in a very broad sense that includes e.g. “comments sections” and the like, forums, etc. Anywhere very large groups of humans find ample evidence to confirm (or trouble) their priors before reacting further to the provocation!
One question turning in the back of my mind throughout this: “Has reactive amplification ever produced anything good?”
At FB people often (and glibly) cited the civil rights movement c. 1965 as an example of how “radicalization” can have positive social outcomes. Is the same true of this large-scale volume raising?
The only examples I can think of are those where online life crosses offline - a protest forming, a leader deposed, a corruption prosecuted. You need to leave the platform to achieve anything at all.
In that light it’s funny that platform policies are so laser focused on preventing real world outcomes like Jan 6 - as if to say “fight all you want on the field, just don’t take it outside (where it might actually touch reality).
Please keep all exploding atoms inside the reactor.
I absolutely think you could make an accelerationist / Hegelian claim that this is all good, actually, but to do so I think you need to believe in some sort of political or cultural teleology + have confidence that synthesis is always moving us “forward,” whatever that might mean. I’m unpersuaded for many reasons.
I am dying lolin at that last line; “listen, people, we *love* the energy, but it needs to be focused into clicks only for this to work the way we want!” We stan an engaged userbase; we hate an activist population!
> We are like the first humans to move into cities.
Interesting to follow that analogy. A new environment for disease— we haven’t learned to stop throwing our refuse on the streets yet, and we’re brewing all kinds of new plagues.
Eventually we’ll get to sanitation systems and all that. In the meantime beware of any city dweller you meet with and odd look about them.
I remember reading somewhere that the migration to cities actually took place in fits and starts for this reason: migration into them, then explosions of disease and strife and fires and sieges; then flight from them; then reconvening decades or centuries later; etc. Eventually there were sewage systems and plumbing and better food hygiene and improvements to architecture and so on.
I do literally think of a lot of what we do as “the scale tinkering”(or what Popper called “piecemeal social engineering”) needed to make this stuff feasible!
I can’t believe we get to work on this. What could be more fun?!
One thing that struck me is that as much as we don't understand the effects of communication at massive scale, we also simply don't understand the scale itself. What does it mean to me, locally, that Facebook has 2b DAUs? What does it mean that the average user spends x minutes on IG each day?
These are averages across absolutely massive numbers and they're useless in helping me model social media use and the effect it might be having on the people around me. Are they doped up on vitriolic political crap or do they just get a quick hit of animal memes most days? We don't have anything close to a useful understanding here and we're all going with whatever assumptions fit our models best: "everyone's hooked", "no one uses Facebook anymore", "it's just parents posting photos of babies", etc.
Absolutely! I’ve long had this fantasy of working with Joro on some visualizations of the is somehow, eg some animations of huge fields of particles all moving in and out of zones of distress and conflict (at the margins or spread thinly within even bigger fields) for different durations and, although probably impossible to visualize, to different degrees / in different ways.
It’s like scale + this incredible number of variables and with this incredible about of diversity, truly a new thing to feel your way through. I wonder if they’ll ever have population statistics concepts that help us understand when eg a fringe group is going to matter or not, or otherwise make better sense and figure out hot to relate to it all. But I sort of doubt it, since the how challenge is that individuals are completely unpredictable and kind “incompatible” with scale concepts!
“First, we rarely consider extremists on our side to be on our side. This is called in philosophy the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. For example, I might show you a tweet in which someone I perceive as your ally says something completely insane. You might respond: “Please, that’s not an ally of mine. No real [whatever] thinks that way!” But of course, you probably believe that your opponents are defined by their extremes (or again, by their failure to control their extremes).”
This is such a big piece of this for me because I think you can really learn to see this psychological pattern as it’s happening and before it flourishes into extremist mental ranting. FAE for scales larger than 1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
When we’re in default mode network / papança mental rambling, it’s so easy to let the defense attorney pilot indefinitely. I’d like to think being a naturally argumentative person equips me to occasionally turn the tools on myself and simulate the prosecution at a productive fidelity.
Panança! 100%. We are direct beneficiaries of the Dick Wolf media empire; ten thousand episodes of “Law and Order” later and we’re ready to be demolished on cross, anticipate it, and take it seriously. I do think it’s very helpful to have been horribly wrong a lot, which makes it unfortunate for anyone born later than us. I got to humiliate myself locally; today the costs of errors seem to be much higher (sometimes).
Discourse died with Orbach
“Gas, grass, or Jerry Orbach: no one rides for free.” I should break that gold Jerry jacket out again!
Some echoes in here of DFW’s “This is Water”, including the exhortation at the end. DFW closed with “I wish you way more than luck”; we all need persistence and wisdom and luck not to be captivated by this phenomenon.
But it’s possible to do so! For me, politics has been a helpful example: like 85% of my Facebook friends & 50% of my Twitter follows were Elizabeth Warren fans, and it was illuminating to realize that in real life approximately nobody cared about her campaign. But of course I also spent a good 18 months spending hours on Twitter most days, pumping cortisol into my veins until I would come to, shaking. I feel lucky not to be in that place anymore.
I haven’t read that essay in years but I, like a lot of people I think, really loved it. It seems like getting old has me on a bit of a theme, and that theme has something to do with the substitution of reality with something else, something rather worse at least for one’s sanity!
Campaigns are an extremely strong demonstration of this, for better and much worse!
Amazing post. Loved it as always! My mind kept taking me back to the format and the etiquette it promotes as the biggest culprit in this. A comment, a tweet composer, a blank canvas seems far too unnatural. It asks people to form a complete thought in the form of a statement immediately after reading anything and everything. Even this textfield that I'm typing on right now started with "Write a comment..." but why!? It would be like me saying something out loud, to you or a large crowd, and then immediately asking everyone to react publicly and eloquently in a way that will be recorded in time forever. Idk, this is not a well-formed thought but I think there's something about the format (all formats we've invented so far) in which we engage with each other online that exacerbates the need to make a statement, however radical it may be.
I do love to imagine how these UIs would work “IRL.” You and I go to have lunch at some restaurant with around 150-200 other people and in the middle of the meal, the waiter approaches and offers us a bullhorn, and we *immediately* start talking about the things we think the other diners are mistaken about!
It’s a mess man. Proud to have played an infinitesimally small role in it all lmfao. “Bullhorn Designers.”
“More than anything else, to me, this is what the Internet is: mutual reactive extremification running amok in countless domains in an accelerating and self-reinforcing process.”
Evergreen question: when you say “the internet”, do you mean social media?
I might yes! If I do, though, I’d like to mean it in a very broad sense that includes e.g. “comments sections” and the like, forums, etc. Anywhere very large groups of humans find ample evidence to confirm (or trouble) their priors before reacting further to the provocation!
One question turning in the back of my mind throughout this: “Has reactive amplification ever produced anything good?”
At FB people often (and glibly) cited the civil rights movement c. 1965 as an example of how “radicalization” can have positive social outcomes. Is the same true of this large-scale volume raising?
The only examples I can think of are those where online life crosses offline - a protest forming, a leader deposed, a corruption prosecuted. You need to leave the platform to achieve anything at all.
In that light it’s funny that platform policies are so laser focused on preventing real world outcomes like Jan 6 - as if to say “fight all you want on the field, just don’t take it outside (where it might actually touch reality).
Please keep all exploding atoms inside the reactor.
I absolutely think you could make an accelerationist / Hegelian claim that this is all good, actually, but to do so I think you need to believe in some sort of political or cultural teleology + have confidence that synthesis is always moving us “forward,” whatever that might mean. I’m unpersuaded for many reasons.
I am dying lolin at that last line; “listen, people, we *love* the energy, but it needs to be focused into clicks only for this to work the way we want!” We stan an engaged userbase; we hate an activist population!
haha I almost abandoned this entire comment upon typing the word “good.” Such impossible complexity is never worth broaching online.
> We are like the first humans to move into cities.
Interesting to follow that analogy. A new environment for disease— we haven’t learned to stop throwing our refuse on the streets yet, and we’re brewing all kinds of new plagues.
Eventually we’ll get to sanitation systems and all that. In the meantime beware of any city dweller you meet with and odd look about them.
I remember reading somewhere that the migration to cities actually took place in fits and starts for this reason: migration into them, then explosions of disease and strife and fires and sieges; then flight from them; then reconvening decades or centuries later; etc. Eventually there were sewage systems and plumbing and better food hygiene and improvements to architecture and so on.
I do literally think of a lot of what we do as “the scale tinkering”(or what Popper called “piecemeal social engineering”) needed to make this stuff feasible!
I can’t believe we get to work on this. What could be more fun?!
Hot damn, you are on a roll! Great post.
One thing that struck me is that as much as we don't understand the effects of communication at massive scale, we also simply don't understand the scale itself. What does it mean to me, locally, that Facebook has 2b DAUs? What does it mean that the average user spends x minutes on IG each day?
These are averages across absolutely massive numbers and they're useless in helping me model social media use and the effect it might be having on the people around me. Are they doped up on vitriolic political crap or do they just get a quick hit of animal memes most days? We don't have anything close to a useful understanding here and we're all going with whatever assumptions fit our models best: "everyone's hooked", "no one uses Facebook anymore", "it's just parents posting photos of babies", etc.
Absolutely! I’ve long had this fantasy of working with Joro on some visualizations of the is somehow, eg some animations of huge fields of particles all moving in and out of zones of distress and conflict (at the margins or spread thinly within even bigger fields) for different durations and, although probably impossible to visualize, to different degrees / in different ways.
It’s like scale + this incredible number of variables and with this incredible about of diversity, truly a new thing to feel your way through. I wonder if they’ll ever have population statistics concepts that help us understand when eg a fringe group is going to matter or not, or otherwise make better sense and figure out hot to relate to it all. But I sort of doubt it, since the how challenge is that individuals are completely unpredictable and kind “incompatible” with scale concepts!
That would both be fascinating and lead to some Minority Report shit very quickly, I think! 😆